Canceled- Book Talk: 30 Portraits

This event has been canceled.

Abbas Milani discusses his new book 30 Portraits. Event will be in Persian. 
 
"30 Portraits is a collection of my experiences and memories with thirty of my friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. I made the selection of these individuals not only based on the roles they have played in my life, but their invaluable role in the developments in Iran over the past half century. The catalyst for historical events has, on the one hand, been a result of political and economic structures and the will of leaders, and on the other hand, the consequence of active resistance or silent complacency of people—this book is my account of thirty of such people. I wrote about each of the individuals as an independent account. However, when I placed them together, they appeared to represent a continuous chronology of what has occurred in our collective history. One should not search for the reasons behind the developments of the past forty years in Iran in the hands of the Devil or at Mount Qaf, in similar fashion to Attar's mythological Simourgh. Rather, to understand our modern history, we must seek nowhere else but in ourselves—as it is from us that is upon us."

Abbas Milani is the Director of the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Program in Iranian Studies at Stanford University, an Adjunct Professor, and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His expertise is U.S.-Iran relations as well as Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. Milani is the author of numerous books in Persian and English including Modernity and Its Foes in Iran; Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran; Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir; The Shah; Culture and Politics in Contemporary Iran was co-edited with Larry Diamond. He recently edited and wrote the introduction for A Window into Modern Iran: The Ardeshir Zahedi Papers at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives and wrote Saadi and Humanism with Maryam Mirzadeh. This year, he edited and translated An Encounter with Dylan Thomas by Ebrahim Golestan and published volume one of his 30 Portraits. Milani has also translated numerous books and articles into Persian and English. He has published more than 200 essays and book reviews in journals and papers.

If you need a disability-related accommodation for this event, please contact us at iranianstudies [at] stanford.edu (iranianstudies[at]stanford[dot]edu). Requests should be made by November 8, 2022.

Part of the Stanford Festival of Iranian Arts